Project Closure

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Integrated Project Management
By Earl Hall, Juliane Johnson
Table of Contents
Chapter 14.  Achieving Closure


Managing a significant project is absolutely a full-time job. The project manager is kept extremely busy near a project's end, monitoring its progress and preparing for shutdown. When walking about and visiting the workstations, he or she must re-emphasize the need for good communication among task leaders; encourage the give and take that supports the internal customer principle; be attentive to the project timetable; actively help task leaders get their tasks started and completed on time; monitor the Gantt chart; and as some original estimates overrun, alert downstream task leaders to the scheduling changes. If a task finishes early, which occasionally happens, more time is bought for the risk factor. With an early finish, the project manager must help downstream task leaders readjust their start time; when a task overruns, he or she helps marshal the resources identified in the task notes file to cover the overrun.

Should a change in the project become necessary, the project must be replanned, with the project manager scheduling the replanning meetings, drafting agendas, and leading the meetings. When a revised plan has been approved, and the sponsor and the project manager have both signed off on it, all of the old plan's Gantt charts must be destroyed, and every downstream task leader for tasks starting after the change was inserted must be given a copy of the new Gantt chart.

The project manager must be alert to not allow changes that were initiated within tasks sneak into the project. Engineers and other technical people have a tendency to "over-engineer" their work to make their product exquisite. Generally, "good" is all that is needed; exquisite takes longer. During the walk-about, the project manager should watch out for "exquisite" and keep the task leaders focused on "good."


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    Integrated Project Management
    Integrated Project Management
    ISBN: 0071466266
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 190

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